Citing an increase in the number of people living on the city’s streets, the DeLand City Commission approved a handful of new rules Feb. 19. The rules will disallow camping and sleeping on the streets and empower the DeLand Police Department to take people directly to social services. If they refuse assistance, unhoused individuals may be arrested.

The city’s three new ordinances will outlaw camping on the streets, storing personal property — like trash bags or suitcases — on the sidewalks and sleeping on streets or benches. The rules are made possible by a $70,000 agreement with First Step Shelter near Daytona Beach.

City Attorney Darren Elkind explained that arrests can’t be made unless there is a low-barrier shelter where people living on the street can go. Low-barrier shelters have less stringent requirements than others. The Neighborhood Center of West Volusia doesn’t have the capacity to offer that, but First Step does.

“We cannot tell somebody they can’t sleep in a public place unless there is a place for them to go. We cannot criminalize homelessness,” Elkind said. “Now, if people say, ‘I don’t care. There’s a place for me to go, and you’ll take me there and it doesn’t cost me anything, but I just don’t want to go,’ then we can arrest those folks. Then we can criminalize that behavior.”

An increased responsibility for police officers will also come, City Manager Michael Pleus said, with expanded “coverage and enforcement” in Downtown DeLand.

The plan isn’t to simply cart every person on the street to jail, Elkind said, but to empower the police — specifically officers who are already tuned in to the local unhoused population — to bring people directly to social services.

“Those folks will be dealing with the homeless, hopefully compassionately,” Elkind said, “and actually providing transportation to one of the shelters and otherwise helping the folks who are dealing with homelessness.” 

Not everyone was on board with a proposal that puts law enforcement first in efforts to bring people to social services at risk of arrest.

Speaking during the public comment portion of the meeting, former DeLand City Manager Mike Abels stressed to the City Commission that the new rules were unlikely to have the effect the city wants and were ultimately unfair to law-enforcement officers.

“The Police Department has become the front line of the mental health system, and they should not be,” Abels said. “Police officers are not trained as mental health counselors and their job is a different job than what a mental health counselor would be.”

Abels worked in the mental health world in the 1970s, and he said the erosion of federal and state support for caseworkers and other social services have forced huge problems on local governments who aren’t cut out to solve them.

“Like so many other social problems, homelessness has been pushed by the federal and state governments to the local government, but homelessness is not — cannot be, in my opinion — a local government-focused problem,” he said.

But the City Commission acknowledged that these new rules weren’t going to solve every problem the city faces.

Still, in addition to curbing the population of unhoused people in Downtown DeLand and hopefully bringing them to social services, City Commissioner Kevin Reid said he hopes that the increased police presence Downtown will curb other unsavory behavior he said he has heard complaints of. 

Mayor Chris Cloudman agreed that an increased police presence Downtown could help to curb behavior that, while not good, is not directly related to homelessness, like people walking into staff-only areas of shops.

“The three ordinances we’re discussing this evening won’t address everything,” he said. “They’re a good start.”

The ordinances passed with unanimous approval by the City Commission.